Arts and crafts are a great way to use spare time in a productive manner, can make for a fun and rewarding hobby, and can even bring extra money into your home!
At Freshly Picked Blog, we know how inspiring crafts made by our own hands can be, and we want to share our know-how and projects with you so that you can get the most out of your crafting room. From Vinyl Cutters and Sticker Printer reviews to guides detailing how to use Cricut Makers, we put only the most reliable products to the test.
We may receive a commission on some of the arts and crafts products we review, but our goal is to test and review products that we know will make the lives of fellow DIYers easier, better, and more fun!
How We Test Arts and Crafts Products
Before we test any product, we do thorough research into the craft items and machines we want to review.
These include, but aren’t limited to:
- Vinyl cutters and vinyl products
- Heat press machines
- Stickers and decals, plus machines
- Cricut machines
Regardless of the products we decide to review, we put effort into researching products to make sure they’re worth putting to the test. Finding craft machines and items that are worth trying out and potentially recommending to our readers can be a time-consuming task, but we begin by locating trustworthy brands in the craft world.
We also keep tabs on what other crafters and DIYers are raving over, and scroll through our fair share of user reviews and testimonials to see which machines we’d like to try ourselves. Because user reviews can be faked, we make sure to only take the reviews with verified purchases to heart.
Once we find the craft items and machines we want to test and rank, we put them to good use in our businesses and home craft rooms to see how they work and if they meet (or don’t meet) our expectations.
Testing We Can Observe and Recreate
When testing a product or machine, we make sure that we perform tests that lead to results we can recreate. Whether we’re testing one or multiple products, we aim to carry out the same tests multiple times so that we know we’re seeing reliable results.
This repetitive testing confirms if craft products are working as intended by the company or as we expected during our selection process. We only rank the machines and products we try on qualities we feel crafters will care about the most.
Such as:
- Performance. We determine through testing if machines and products are working as they should and rank them out of 5.
- Affordability. Based on what the machine or craft item is, we determine if its a reasonable price for the average home crafter or craft business.
- Quality: We look to see if the quality of the machine holds up to our expectations. Will it last through years of use? Will the product lead to quality, well-made crafts?
After we’ve tested the product(s), we’ll decide which product is best for specific purposes. For example, Best for Budgets, Best for Commercial or Business Use, Best for Home Use, and other specifics.
Tester Opinions
We know that scientific testing and findings matter, but we also know that the personal opinions of crafters like you matter, too. Our team at Freshly Picked Blog won’t only share the product specifics, but we’ll also share our personal experiences with them.
You’ll discover what we liked about a craft machine, didn’t like so much, and what we think would have been better. We aspire to give you as much detail as possible so that you can make the right decision for your crafting needs.
Testing Products at Home
We test products right in our own home crafting rooms and put them through realistic crafting tasks so that we can give products a natural environment to perform in.
We aim to test products and machines for a few weeks at minimum to really get a feel for how they work and the tasks they can perform. We’ll keep testing until we’re satisfied that we’re seeing accurate and reliable results.
Why Trust Us?
We’re crafters and DIYers who love to customize, vinyl-ize, and stickerize and our purpose is to provide crafters like ourselves with information they can use to make quality crafts at home and in their businesses using products they can trust.
Though we may earn a commission on some of the products we recommend, we’ll never recommend products to our readers that we feel didn’t meet our expectations.
In fact, if a product isn’t reliable, we may not even include it in our review guides, or we’ll list them at the end so that you can compare the products yourself, and see why it didn’t make our top picks.
